Aluminum (PLA) Falcon Progress update

Boy its been a long time since we last made a blog update, nearly four months! It’s been nearly as long since we released any definitive news on our solid fuel rocket project, the Aluminum (PLA) Falcon. Over the last four months, we have continuously refined our design: to fit smaller and smaller printer sizes without compromising the fuselage volume, to look more aesthetically pleasing and to reward those who backed our H2O2 rocket Kickstarter. With the arrival of a MakerBot replicator 2 at New trier High School two weeks ago, we decided that the rocket has as good as it was going to get and gave the go ahead for printing.

So far, we’ve printed four out of the nine parts that constitute the completed rocket. The picture on the far left shows a portion of both the upper and lower fuselage, the center displays a face of the upper fuselage embossed with the names of our Kickstarter backers (a little hard to read unfortunately due to printer resolution) while the far right shows the same part embossed with our name. The parts lock together using a male-female mating system combined with glue and a sheet of aluminum inserted into the fuselage. The rest of the rocket should be printed within the next two weeks, so stay tuned.

Best Wishes,

Joshua DerrickCo-founder and Chief Engineer“Wake up and smell the science”